100 Islands National Park & Baguio

Funnily enough, everything that Lonely Planet recommends is completely overcrowded and twice as expensive. The 100 Islands National Park tops that. The cabins on the outermost island now cost four times as much as they did two years ago. So bye-bye Robinson, hello day trip. At 17 euros for a few hours on a private boat trip to some of the more than one hundred islands, it’s okay.

The islands are coral reefs raised from the seabed, completely overgrown with greenery and gnawed away by the sea at all edges. Some look like turtles, but most look like fossilised hippie mushrooms. I take my kite gear with me on the little bangka. Unfortunately, there’s no wind. But the trip is still great.

Air at last, no stress, sun and sea. It can go on like this. On Quezon Island, we meet an expat Filipino from Texas who is walking in the footsteps of his uncle who died in the Second World War. I wonder why he’s here. Never mind. Up to the islands, down from the island, next island, another beach. After two days of racing, the four hours on the 100 Islands feel like a month-long break.

We continue northwards in the early afternoon. The towns become denser again, the roads once more completely overcrowded. After three hours, we arrive at the foothills of the Cordillera just as the sun is setting. The road is clear again and we speed upwards like a rollercoaster to almost 1500 metres. The sunset behind us is absolutely amazing.

We only reach Baguio in the dark again. Manila celebrates the ultimate traffic gridlock in the area. Baguio does it vertically. If the Incas had ever landed in the Philippines, they would have founded this city on this very spot. The houses of 500,000 inhabitants claw into the slopes of a steep mountain ridge. In between, cars are jammed to death on all the access roads. Stop and go on the steep slope. No city in the world burns up more clutch discs.

Thanks to the satnav working again, we arrive at the wrong address after just one penalty lap and an hour for five kilometres, almost completely unstressed. We quickly turn the wrong address into the right one and stay in a really posh place after yesterday’s shack instead of a cheap hostel as planned. We head into the city, but Uli panics a little on the way to the centre, where the red light district is a little too dirty, dark and long. We continue by jeepney.

The centre is a different world: clean, classy, new. Everything else so far has been third world, this is the Switzerland of the Philippines. The food is expensive, small and damn good. I catch a glimpse of home: the Marienplatz cellar is just round the corner. Stag antlers hang on the walls. I order “Zwoa Seidl fia mi und mei Weibl”. The waitress gives me a somewhat irritated look and then places a Löwenbräu beer mug with piss-warm Smirnoff ice cream on Mabuhai in front of me. Remember: a fish head is more Bavarian than a Philippine Hofbräuhaus.